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v0.34:How do I manage my seeds and crops
| This article is about an older version of DF. |
Managing Seeds
Seeds are what are used to grow crops. You may begin the game with a certain number of seeds, trade for them, or gather them. In addition to this, eating, milling and brewing plants often yield a seed (assuming your fortress hasn't hit the seed cap for that plant). Cooking plants does not yield seeds, and cooking seeds makes them unusable for planting, so you may want to watch out and make sure you don't convert the last of your plants into +sweet pod roast+ without the ability to make more.
You can create a custom stockpile near your farm which will only accept seeds. This will consolidate your seeds into one place, instead of having them littered all through the dining room. Seeds are stored in bags (up to 100 seeds per bag), and seed bags can be stored in barrels.
Each plant has a seed cap set at 200. Brewing, milling, and eating raw plants will not generate additional seeds once the cap is reached, although your trader may still barter for additional seed bags and thus exceed this limit. Once the count of seeds falls below 200, new seeds will again be generated.
Most seeds may be toggled for cooking on the Kitchen tab of the stocks menu. The exception, rock nuts, may be eaten raw. Disabling seed cooking will keep most of your seeds safe from starving dwarves; unfortunately there is no way to prevent your dwarves from consuming rock nuts short of forbidding them all.
Managing Crops
When ripe, your dwarves will harvest your crops from the farm plots. This will yield one or more stacks of plants, which will be hauled to the appropriate stockpile. It is generally a good idea to have sufficient barrels to hold the food, as food is subject to withering and the predation of vermin. Metal barrels are especially effective against vermin.
You can create a custom stockpile that will only accept plants, to avoid having it all mixed up with your meat and drinks. It would be a good idea to have this stockpile near your still, farmer's workshop, kitchen, etc. You may also choose to make more specialized stockpiles, for instance if your windmill is located far away from your farms, you might have small nearby stockpiles dedicated solely to millable plants and flour so as to save on hauling.
The Kitchen tab on the stocks menu allows you to control which crops, if any, your dwarves will use as ingredients when cooking. Be careful when you are cultivating new crops or running low on others, and make sure you don't cook the last of them instead of recovering the valuable seeds. Note that experienced farmers and crop fertilization significantly increase the return on planted seeds, and can be quite useful when attempting to build your seed stockpile.